Negro quarters, Thomasville, Georgia

Visitors should be warned that several of the words, descriptions, and images from Harper's Weekly are considered racially offensive by today's standards. The materials are presented in order to give a true historical picture of the leading 19th-century newspaper's view of black Americans.

Creator unknown. [The condition of the negro in our Southern States presents one of the most curious and (for the region in which his lot is cast), one of the most momentous problems of modern times. Sudden steps in evolution are always rare, and never before in history has a race been transferred in a moment, so to speak, from a state of slavery centuries-long, to one of freedom. It is an extraordinary test to put on any class of people to go at once from absolute dependence upon others to perfect self-responsibility, surrounded meanwhile by an alien and a dominant race. The colored inhabitants of the South have had but small help in solving the gigantic problem resulting from this sudden change. Unexpectedly released from bondage, the negroes gave their first years of liberty to self-indulgence. Later they began to take an interest in better things. The illustration shows some of the dwellings which they have achieved for themselves, where they have felt the force of contact with the white race. As one might expect, these show traces of their former habits of slavery and dependence, but they also reveal the imitative tendency, through which alone the mass of them can ever take the first steps in upward evolution. Simple and apparently local as is this particular theme, it is nevertheless typical of scores of other places where these preliminary steps are being taken, and hence is full of suggestion. But the final solution of the race problem is by no means assured].